Library school is an academic absurdity. At least ninety per cent of what it teaches, and ninety per cent of all library literature, is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Still, though fully aware that getting a library degree would be as bad as getting a teaching credential, I bought a gas mask, shovel, and a pair of hip boots and got an MLS anyhow, since it seemed to be a good union card and meal ticket.

Now, however, with job opportunities shrinking drastically for librarians, the MLS is about as useless as Confederate money. Despite this turn of events, the USC library school, at least, continues to broadcast public-service announcements on Los Angeles radio stations about how badly librarians are needed. Fraud!

Technological change notwithstanding, libraries in their present form seem destined to be with us at least a few years longer, and some new librarians, at least, will be needed to staff them. Besides eliminating their recruitment programs, here is what library schools can do to improve their absurd position:

First they should reduce their graduation requirements to a maximum of three courses.

One course could serve as a general introduction to librarianship, providing the student at the same time with all the solid information there is on acquisitions and administration. To have separate courses on book selection and library administration only piles bullshit on top of bullshit.

A second course could teach all that a student can effectively learn in school about cataloguing. When I was at USC, two courses were required, one on Dewey, the other on LC. Not enough information was included in these courses to justify even one full semester's work, much less two. Besides, cataloguing books is a skill that can best be taught through programmed instruction. Any attempt to teach it according to the lecture system in order to give it academic respectability only makes it ridiculous.

The final course could treat bibliography. A person should take it only after getting some practical experience at the reference desk. Otherwise, it can only lead to mental indigestion.

This brings us to a very important point: library school, instead of being a prerequisite to working as a librarian, should be an adjunct to practical experience in the field. Librarianship, like many other pseudo-academic disciplines currently taught in colleges in a pathetic attempt to professionalize them, should be learned through apprenticeship.

Imagine, if you can, a nursing school that gave its students nothing but lecture courses -- complete with term papers, midterm exams, and finals -- on treating patients with severe fractures, burns, or infections. After a year of this type of "education," what do you suppose would happen to a nurse suddenly turned loose on a real live patient? He would probably be lucky if he didn't kill him!

Nursing schools, though clogged with Mickey Mouse academic trivia, have to be a good deal more realistic in their training than library schools since physical crisis is involved. An incompetent librarian, after all, can do little social or physical harm to students or patrons. The worst he or she can do is make them hate libraries and reading. Some people can argue convincingly that such a turnoff would be a benefit.

One other point: it is ridiculous to require a master's degree, or even a BA, of a prospective librarian. An intelligent high-school graduate who is really into being a librarian can easily work through the three-course curriculum I have proposed. He may add to these courses if he decides he needs them to do his work better or develop himself personally. But he alone should decide what further courses to take, if any. Many of them will best be taught outside of library school. No further courses should be forced upon him as part of some spurious credentialing requirement. Any teacher who has piled up units to work his way up a salary schedule knows what this practice leads to.

This curriculum is quite enough to develop what is currently accepted as competent performance among library "professionals." I am not saying that a person with this training could run the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Archives, or the Library of Congress. People in these jobs often don't have library degrees anyhow.

Finally, library educators should rid themselves of the pretentiously nonsensical notion that librarianship is a learned profession. It is nothing but a glorified clerical occupation. Because of professional empire building, it is also an overpaid clerical occupation. Of course, it is also possible to argue that clerks in general are underpaid if the prevailing wages of librarians are taken as the clerical norm.

Empire building among librarians converted the bachelor's degree in library science into a master's degree by little more than raising course numbers and requiring a fribbling thesis. One of the few good things I can say about the USC library school is that up to now their MLS candidates have not taken up valuable space in the Doheny Library stacks with pseudo-scholarly treatises on how the Fullerton Public Library processes its serials. This is changing, most unfortunately, now that they have started a PhD program.

If these suggestions can be implemented, we may be able to start cutting a lot of the stupidity out of librarianship. In my adult reader guidance class, a course with less content than the void of interstellar space, the teacher, in his helplessness to find something to lecture on, would often come out with pointless profundities such as "In preparing an oral book review, there are two types of readers you must continually keep in mind: those who have read the book and those who have not!" I was dumbfounded to find most of my fellow students writing furiously to take this down word for word in fear they would have to regurgitate it on an exam. Some of us struggled to contain our laughter. Others took it seriously. To my mind, this speaks very ill for the general caliber of human vegetables preparing for the "profession!"